Meze Audio is best known as a pioneer in HiFi headphones, elevating entry level audiophile headphones with the 99 Classics and then rocking the flagship market with Empyrean. Meze has used their sonic expertise in headphones to craft a number of excellent IEMs, like the Advar and Alba in the past, and aims to continue delivering IEMs that combine sound quality and build quality with Astru, their latest IEM, priced at $899. Does Astru earn a place in Meze’s pantheon of excellent IEMs and headphones.
Build and Design
The Astru experience begins with an IEM crafted from CNC milled titanium, offering a top-of-the-line look and feel. Astru uses just one dynamic driver on each side, and the single-driver design lends to a small, sleek shell that slides easily into your ears. Smaller details like the y-split and cable only serve to add to the sense of quality. All together, the combination of visual design, materials, and fit provides for a smooth, luxurious experience.
The included package is generally nice, but not exceptional for the price. Inside the box, you’ll find the IEMs, a silver-plated copper cable with good flexibility and a nice feel to it, silicone eartips, a case, and a smaller carrying bag. The case is solid and very practical, while the smaller bag offers less protection, but will more easily slip into your pocket. So while the IEMs and cable deliver a look, feel, and fit that exceeds expectations, the rest of the package is good, but not exceptional.
Sound
Meze is known for favoring warm musicality over pinpoint accuracy, but lately they’ve been striking a stronger balance, leaning more into detail and accuracy, while still preserving the core brand characteristic of emotional sound. Astru is perhaps the best realization of this vision yet, offering a tuning that falls in the vicinity of warm-neutral, while offering a wide soundstage and strong imaging.
There’s an elevation that starts in the low mids and goes down through the subbass. The subbass rumble and extension, coupled with strong texture is one of Astru’s highlights. There’s nice punch and impact as well, providing a strong but well-balanced low-end experience.
The midrange is clean, providing detail and layering that isn’t disrupted by the bass elevation. Astru offers natural timbre with acoustic instruments along with rich vocals that convey strong emotion. The vocals are pulled back just slightly, lending to the sense of width and space, but sometimes taking some power away from the vocal presentation.
Astru’s treble is nicely extended, with a touch of air at the top, but without any real spice or energy at the top. Astru offers a nice sense of air, while providing a generally relaxed, nonfatiguing treble.
Astru’s soundstage feels wide and three-dimensional with a strong feeling of separation and space between instruments. There’s a general sense of good body and weight to instruments, but the spacing can sometimes feel diffuse with a bit of extra space in between elements at times. In spite of that, the overall feeling is natural and immersive, putting the listener in a psychoacoustic space surrounded by the music.
Astru is perfectly content to be driven by a low power dongle or basic headphone out, but it scales quite nicely with higher end or desktop gear. While I was doing some comparative listening, I noted that the other IEMs in my comparison all sounded pretty much the same from the Questyle M15C, iBasso DX270, or Audma Brioso, but it felt like Astru kept getting better, and ended up feeling like a genuine flagship with the $5000 Brioso, where I didn’t get the same sense of improvement in dynamics and staging from the other IEMs.
Astu provides a smooth and welcoming expression of the sweeping arpeggiated synthesizer at the start of Steven Wilson’s “Pariah.” The male vocals on the first continue to pull you in the immersion that overtakes you as layers build into the second verse. Each piece has crystal clear separation but together feels cohesive and blended. The female vocals demonstrate power and presence above the more relaxed vocals, and as the song shifts into the crescendo at the end, Astru delivers the full dynamic build as a whole, while offering incredible detail in every element of the song.
Listening to a classic jazz track like Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins performance of “The Way You Look Tonight,” Astru offers a nice sense of separation, with each instrument occupying a distinct space on the stage. The bass has a nice combination of warmth and clean articulation offering a sound that’s both natural and detailed. The piano is also nicely balanced, but the saxophone is the real highlight: Astru’s dynamic delivery offers crystal clear detail and captures the full range of Sonny Rollins deft saxophone soloing from the smooth runs to the biting highs.
The opening of Nine Inch Nails “The Day the World Went Away” layers atmospheric synthesizers, with heavily distorted guitars and bass for a massive wall of barely melodic noise. Astru delivers nice layering through the cacophony allowing the listener to separate each layer of the mix, while providing just enough warmth and smoothness to keep the harsh nature of the sounds from feeling harsh on the ears. When the volume goes down, Astru handles the dynamic shift to soft, intimate vocals quite well, and delivers natural timbre for the vocals and clean guitar. The final shift back to heavy further demonstrates Astru’s strong dynamics as it blasts you with another brilliantly layered wall of sonic annihilation.
Comparison: DITA Mecha
If I had a nickel for every $899 single dynamic driver IEM with a titanium shell and a five-letter name – made by a brand with a four-letter name – on the market right now, I’d have two nickels, but it’s still a little weird that there’s two of them. In one corner we have the Meze Astru, while in the other, we have the DITA Mecha.
While they look pretty similar on paper, the actual design and feel of the two IEMs is very different. Mecha has a larger shell with a more traditional style shell, while Astru is much smaller with a more unique design. Similarly both include a silver-plated copper cable, with Meze sporting a transparent wrap that gives it a bright look, while DITA has a more opaque wrap which gives the whole IEM a darker vibe.
In terms of sound, the bass delivery is actually pretty similar between the two, with similar extension and balance, but Mecha has more elevated mids, which offers a higher level of clarity and makes the presentation more vocal forward. In some cases, Mecha delivers a higher level of detail, but it’s also more prone to fatigue, and some vocalists feel shouty on Mecha while having a smoother delivery on Astru. Astru just generally has a touch of warm and smoothness to the sound, while Mecha is a bit more energetic.
The Bottom Line
Astru might not do anything that’s too different from what Meze has done in the past – or that’s very different from a lot of popular IEMs on the market – but the execution on it is brilliant. The build, design, and sound all both pay homage to Meze’s past, while lining up with what IEM listeners are looking for in 2026. With Astru, Meze delivers not just a great tuning or something that fits into their general tuning style, but quite possibly their best IEM yet.
